More and more cable
company installers are independent contractors.
Photo illustration by
Holly Allen. Photo by iStock.
This article was
reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.
Harry Benion drives a
blue 2002 Dodge Caravan. Outside, the minivan is streaked with the salt and
grit of the long Detroit winter. Inside, it’s littered with spare change, old
coffee cups, a half-empty packet of Newports, and half a dozen remote controls.
The middle bench and trunk are jammed with spools of orange and black cable,
and cardboard boxes are piled atop his 5-year-old son’s booster seat. “We live
out of our trucks,” says Benion as he fishes a flexible magnetic sign out of
the back and slaps it onto the minivan’s passenger door. “Authorized Contractor
for Comcast,” the sign reads. “TV – Home Phone – Internet.”
Think about the last
time you needed a visit from a cable guy. You probably saw the same sort of
sign—or a cable company T-shirt, hat, or badge like the ones Benion wears—and
assumed he was an employee of Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon, or another
provider, earning a decent hourly rate to install your DVR or hook up a DSL
line. Historically, that would have been true. Cable companies, like appliance
manufacturers and utility companies, once employed field technicians in large
numbers. And many companies, including Comcast, still employ a roster of
in-house technicians. But they now hand off a significant number of their daily
job assignments to folks who aren’t their employees—they’re independent
contractors, paid a flat fee per task no matter how long it takes. It’s
difficult to say how many full-time jobs have been replaced with freelancers,
since cable companies don’t exactly advertise the practice. But it’s a chief
complaint of the 36,000 Verizon workers who went on strike Wednesday. And in
the Detroit area, Benion estimates,contractors now make up at least half the
workforce. “We’re meant to just pick up the overflow,” says Zachary Goodgall, a
former cable installer and a friend of Benion’s who lives outside of Detroit.
“But honestly, we’re the primary source of Comcast’s work around here.” Jenni
Moyer, a Comcast spokeswoman, declined to give hard numbers but sent a
statement via email: “Based on the seasonality of our business, we do work with
a select group of contracting companies to help manage workload,” she wrote.
“[But] we have tens of thousands of employees that work directly for Comcast
today, and we’re hiring hundreds of Comcast technicians this year.”
Some in the industry say
cable’s employment model shifted because the work changed: “The cable world is
no longer people installing an analog cable line,” says Scott Dutton, director
of product management for CSG International, which he says provides business
services to a quarter of the American cable market, including an app, called
TechNet, used by more than 50,000 technicians each day installing cable across
North America for Comcast, Time Warner, and a dozen other cable, internet, and
utility providers. “Now people have video, internet, voice, home security, and
even whole house automation where you can turn on your air conditioning
remotely. It’s much more complex, so they use many more subcontractors.” But
Goodgall and Benion believe Comcast ramped up its contracting to save money—the
mean annual salary for traditionally employed installers, most of whose
employers are required to provide health benefits, was $54,200 in 2015
according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, far more than what many freelancer
installers earn—and because hourly employees are less efficient. “They’re not
going to work at contractor speeds,” Goodgall says.
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